Very quickly, because I’m using my humanities degree to get this order of fries.

You know, one of the benefits of a liberal education is that one can learn to think critically, and this article raises more questions than it answers: 317,000 waitresses with bachelor’s degrees! Time to panic and lament like in Player Piano that one is expected to have a Ph.D. in Food Delivery and Note-Taking!

Or, maybe, the numbers don’t tell the whole story. If you took a snapshot of me right after college, you’d see someone who was working two part-time jobs. Oh, that education, wasted folding clothes at Dick’s Sporting Goods! Wasted entering check amounts in the bowels of the bank! Prob’ly shoulda gone straight to McDonald’s.

Of course, I was doing that because I needed to earn money to buy business professional clothing, for my job that would start in the fall. What I need to know in order to make sense of those statistics is how long those workers are at that job, and what they earn over a lifetime.

Look, I know as well as anyone that the time where one could get a B.A. and be set for the rest of one’s life is gone, if it ever existed. Degree inflation is insane. But I don’t really see any evidence here that supports Vedder’s thesis that we’re educating all the wrong sorts of people (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) when the jobs he points to are ones where the overwhelming majority of workers don’t have a higher degree. Educated workers are doing vastly better in this recession. The recession hit recent college grads pretty hard, judging by the unemployment rate. It hit those with no college over three times as hard.

I have a lot more to say on this, but briefly: discourse on the value of higher education dangerously conflates what one will do immediately after graduation, or in any single job, with one’s entire life prospects. It conflates what one should major in with whether a department is worth funding and with whether coursework in them is worthwhile. These are different questions. The smart money says that they have different answers.

This is officially an award-winning blog

HNN, Best group blog: "Witty and insightful, the Edge of the American West puts the group in group blog, with frequent contributions from an irreverent band.... Always entertaining, often enlightening, the blog features snazzy visuals—graphs, photos, videos—and zippy writing...."

30 comments

… discourse on the value of higher education dangerously conflates what one will do immediately after graduation, or in any single job, with one’s entire life prospects.

Seems to me that talking about “jobs” conflates what one does in order to eat with what one does in order to have a meaningful life.

I annoy my Princeton-professor brother-in-law by asserting that every BA in English, history etc. should be required to take an associates degree in welding (or machining, woodworking, electrician, etc) and that every BS in engineering should be required to take an associates in poetry (or history, etc.) in order to graduate. Then they both would be (started) on the education needed for a meaningful intellectual life AND trained to do something they could sell for money.

I actually never had a decent job after college (which is part of how I ended up in grad school). The closest thing I had (low-level “manager” for a regional office of the Omaha World-Herald’s circulation department. I hired and fired paper carriers), when I quit, the boss asked me if I thought one of the office assistants could do my job “even though he didn’t have a college degree.” Which was supposedly a requirement for the job.

IOW, my personal anecdotal experience is not that there are too many stupid people getting college degrees; it’s that there are too many stupid jobs that “require” a college education for no good reason. Mostly, I suspect, because it’s a proxy for social class.

do you believe there is enough available work in welding, machining, etc. for all the humanities graduates?

There’s something off about seeing the alternative to humanities to be skilled labor, in any case. For one, there isn’t really an “associate’s degree” equivalent for a lot of that stuff, where the ticketing requirements require an employer to sponsor you. But, more to the point, I know lots of people who have humanities degrees and good jobs not in what they majored in as an undergrad. I can’t see that any of them would be better served with mandatory shop class. Honestly, the BA would be much better served by having coursework in math and computers.

it’s that there are too many stupid jobs that “require” a college education for no good reason. Mostly, I suspect, because it’s a proxy for social class.

Bingo. What’s weird about this piece is that it’s freaking about college graduates working as waitresses, but not questioning why someone has to go to Harvard to study poetry for four years to work on Wall Street.

do you really think that we engineers can weld? I have a M.Sc in Electrical Enginering and I would not dream of calling myself a competent electrician, not even a journeyman. I have a formal education which gives me the ability to analyze and design certain electrical systems, but all that work is done using a computer (or in extremis, pen and paper). Practical skills are a completely different kettle of fish.

Does an American B.Sc. in engineering really involve learning the skills of a trade? In Europe, manual skills are left to the vocational school. Engineers are people who have a rigorous scientific education and who are able to apply the natural sciences to practical engineering problems.

The specific example of welding is obviously goofy — I took it as metonymy for “a skill you can reliably live on.” This sounds reasonable, but I wonder what would, specifically, fill the bill.

When I graduated with a BA in linguistics, in 1986, I was lucky enough to get a job as a programmer in a research institute affiliated with my former department. And I do think programming is a good skill to have, in the abstract. But are there really so many jobs even for programmers?

Specifically, what you need as a BA is the ability to make the case that you can get your first job and do it well. After that you’ll be making your case on your job performance. IME, being able to point to a course in economics, business, math, or IT helps. I also think that critical thinking and writing skills are valuable, too, but that people forget about them.

E.g., I know a theatre B.A. who works designing security systems. Why? He learned autocad. Useless theater major? Hard to say. He’s not doing set design on Broadway for a living, but I’m pretty sure he beat out a few engineers for the position.

I intended “welding” as a metonymy precisely as Vance said. My point is that all students that graduate from a University should have both a salable skill (the “job” part) and the basic tools for a meaningful life. For example, a humanities student should be required to take some “salable” line of study as a minor (e.g., programming, welding, accounting, film editing, etc.) and students who major in salable skills such as engineering should be required to take some quality of life minor (e.g., history, Spanish language and culture, voice and dance, etc.)

Vedder’s article legitimately asks why there are many BS/BA/MS etc. working in no-skill jobs. My idea is that no-one should leave University with a degree unless they have significant skills for life and for work. Unless they pay out-of-state tuition, of course–then they can do whatever they want because UC needs the dough.

My idea is that no-one should leave University with a degree unless they have significant skills for life and for work.

Sure, but that’s not what this data establishes. All it shows that graduating from university does not come with a guarantee of a white-collar office job at all times of one’s post-college life. That’s… not really evidence of anything much. And that’s what makes Vedder’s conclusion (too many people who shouldn’t be are going to college) illegitimate.

Understand, I’m in complete agreement that if college is going to be billed as a way into the middle class, that it should do something help get students there. (And on balance, it seems to do that.) I also think that for some people, the ROI on a liberal arts degree may not be worth it.

I think the real problem is less with people who finish college (unemployment rate of 5%) and more with people who get admitted to college and then washout who end up with the expense and without the pedigree.

As someone who has waited tables in the past, as one of my many jobs to pay my way through college, I find the idea of waiting tables as “no skill” kind of hilarious. It was really difficult, actually, in the beginning.

Rosmar: Ditto for being a busboy or a factory laborer, two of my no-skill jobs. I meant “jobs requiring skills not taught in college” and spoke too loosely.

Dana: Vedder’s conclusion (too many going to college) could be the theme of a chapter in “The Bell Curve.” Since when are people a commodity product that should be educated only if there is a positive return on investment? I suspect it is tied to the near disappearance of the word “citizen” and its replacement with the word “consumer.” Citizens have the right to thelevel of education they want to attempt and can pay for–even if it doesn’t take very well. A rational “consumer,” on the other hand, should optimize his education so as to 1) minimize its cost and 2) maximize his ability to consume. Considerations other than financial are not important in that universe.

sorry for the misunderstanding. I read you too literally, like an engineer. :-)

However, I disagree with you about the content of academic education. The high school should be rigorous enough that it gives the student the prerequisites for intellectually rewarding life: knowledge of national and general history, foreign language skills, writing skills and a solid base of philosophy, religion, mathematics and science.

The purpose of the engineering education, on the other hand, is the formation of an engineer. This means accepting a certain pragmatic outlook of the world: the way of dividing problems into small, solvable parts, which can then be analyzed, and optimized using applied science. Of course, this requires forsaking certain parts of one’s humanity, but such indoctrination is the purpose of engineering education. And it works pretty well: an Indian engineer thinks pretty much the same way as an European one.

…and then they all turn into crazed bombers. That’s how the trope goes, isn’t it?

And on a more serious note, if you think teaching people to be engineers requires a special ‘indoctrination’ that robs them of part of their humanity, what do you think is needed to make someone a doctor, a lawyer, a physicist, an art critic…? I mean, seriously, are you trying to put people off engineering?

As dave said, Lurker is way off. My PhD is in computer science, and they didn’t make us forsake any part of our humanity. Sure, people from different countries learn to approach problems in the discipline in compatible ways, but there’s no need to resort to such drastic hypotheses to explain that.

I think the problem is that 10-15 years ago not everyone went to college after high school. Those who did went on to (normally) bigger and better things economically speaking. Now that more people are going to college, the people who wouldn’t have gone 10-15 years ago are doing the no-skill jobs they would have done without a degree just with a considerable amount of debt they can pay off in 35 years. We’re losing our skilled/semi skilled workforce for BA’s and BS’s to become managers at wendy’s.

Okay, since we’re talking retail management, I’ll bite.
My employer reasonably considers grocery store manager a position that requires a great deal of learning by doing, but also some natural ability. Whether reasonably or not, it also looks for “upper middle class” signalling in those candidates. (As well as diversity, since competence, class origins, and a willingness to commit a decade or more learning the job just isn’t enough hoops.)

On this basis, a decade ago, it used to ask that candidates have a college degree. It doesn’t any more. Now it pretty specifically takes “the right kind of people” who don’t go to college. (In some cases, who do not complete high school.) Why? Are the new crop of retail leadership candidates assumed to lack the ambition that might send them elsewhere, or has the company just “settled?”

More the latter, I think. It’s just a thing that happened, and that is telling enough about the nature of the current job market, at least in Vancouver, Canada.

Do we take too many people out of the entry-level workforce to feed the college industry? Probably –and we have to take seriously the fact that the youth cohort is shrinking every year.

In an era of high unemployment, this may seem counterintuitive. Faced with the prospect of unemployment, it is always tempting to extend your educational run and live off student loans; and that, I think, drives some of this process. (The young are great at coming up with idealistic accounts of their behaviour, IIRC.) Eventually, the thinking is, you’ll pass the magic inflection point and have the education needed to pull in the pay to meet the interest payments on your ever-mounting debt.

But high unemployment is high unemployment. There is unlikely to be a surplus of jobs beckoning at any of the natural break points along the modern educational stream to draw potential students. the inflection point may be a cruel myth –except, that is, to the degree that we have “structural” unemployment and the student has been lucky enough, or clever enough, to pick an educational path feeding one of the under-supplied labour markets. (Engineering? Programming? Forestry? I’m less than entirely convinced.)

That said, we clearly do have such systemic labour shortages, in the skilled trades. The thing is, though, that the inflection point comes before the prospective college student enrolls at all!

Yes, the statistics show that high school dropouts have the worst employment prospects of all, but they do a poor job of disaggregating the statistics. Perhaps employers should be aiming for the ones who are smart enough not to get swept into the stream in the first place. Especially if their car is turbo-powered!

There’s a lot of emphasis in the first year of law school on learning to think like a lawyer. And a certain amount of bootcampery.

What’s amazing about law school is the success of the myth that a JD is going to be good for you even if you don’t want to practice law — that learning to think like a lawyer is just that valuable. This runs aground, ime, fairly early on, because someone who doesn’t want to be a lawyer is just not going to approach learning the rules of civil procedure, or the medieval forms of land tenure, with the same zeal as someone who knows her customers will expect that sort of knowledge going in. By then, though, the loans are taken out, all friends and relatives have already endorsed the law school option, and so the common path forward is reluctantly learning enough to be a mediocre student, for whom the jobs aren’t much better than grocery store stockroom jobs.